


Adventures In Spawn-Minding

by venividivictorious



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Babysitting, Gen, Hair Braiding, Trixie Espinoza & Lucifer Morningstar Bonding, Trixie Espinoza & Lucifer Morningstar Fluff, stepdevil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-13
Updated: 2020-10-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:01:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26997877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venividivictorious/pseuds/venividivictorious
Summary: Lucifer is charged with watching Trixie while Chloe goes on a date. Bonding ensues.
Relationships: Trixie Espinoza & Lucifer Morningstar
Comments: 34
Kudos: 261





	Adventures In Spawn-Minding

**Author's Note:**

> Visit me on tumblr @ venividivictorious!

“It’s one evening, Lucifer,” says the detective, pinching the bridge of her nose. She always does that when she’s frustrated. Usually with him. Sometimes with a bad guy, which is always nice, because he likes it when she’s furious with someone else, but usually it’s him. 

Right now it’s  _ definitely _ him. 

“But Detective -”

“You don’t even have to do anything. Bedtime is eight, she’ll be asleep pretty much the whole time anyway. You won’t need to entertain her. Please. I can’t cancel at such short notice. He’s made plans and everything.”

“But I -  _ me,  _ Detective? Can’t -”

“You’re a respon - you’re an  _ adult _ , Lucifer. For me. Please.  _ I’ll owe you _ .” 

And - well. It’s not really her fault the damnable babysitter left her in the lurch. He heaves a sigh. “Very well.”

Watch the spawn. Fine. How hard can it be to keep track of one diminutive human anyway?

*

The detective is stunning - and in the middle of putting in an earring - when he lets himself into her apartment at 6.27pm. She looks up at the sound of the door and the corner of her mouth quirks up. 

“One of these days,” she tells him as the spawn - “Hi Lucifer!” - barrels full-tilt into his midsection. “You’re going to learn how to knock.”

“ _ I’m _ doing  _ you _ a favour, remember?” he shoots back, attempting to detach her offspring’s sticky hands - gently, he’s not a monster - from his Armani. “Yes, yes, hello, child. That’s enough of that, thank you.”

“Trixie-babe, go finish your pizza.”  _ Bloody hell, her legs in those shoes. _ “Lucifer, thanks so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.”

“Of course, Detective.”

She snags her leather jacket off the hook on the wall and gives him a smile as she dances out the door, and he’s left dithering in her kitchen while the spawn eats oven pizza in the sitting room. 

The Devil, a glorified nest minder. If only Hell could see him now.

*

The detective’s offspring likes to talk. All the time. At a truly impressive speed. And most of it is complete nonsense. She tells him about her day at Spawn Jail while she finishes her pizza - she picks the olives off, which is frankly unacceptable - while he perches on the detective’s couch and tries to resist the urge to challenge Mazikeen on Sex Words With Friends. 

When she’s done, she asks him if she can have dessert - “Well, does your mother usually let you?” “Sure! All the time.” - and between them they polish off the three-quarters-of-chocolate-cake she brings back from the fridge to the tune of some bloody awful animated movie with an admittedly catchy soundtrack. 

It’s not as bad as he was expecting. He can zone out the chatter. He’s sat in council with Azazel, after all, and  _ there _ is a demon who likes to talk. 

“Aren’t you supposed to go to bed at eight?” he asks her at eight-thirty, having only just noticed the time. 

“What?” she fixes him with a look of surprise that he suspects is exaggerated. “No. I’m  _ eight _ . Once you’re eight you get to stay up on Fridays.”

Which...doesn’t sound right, but he doesn’t know enough about human spawn-rearing to contradict her. “Oh. Well, alright then.”

Eventually, partway through a rerun of the second Body Bags film - which, he decides halfway through, is probably not what the detective would consider ‘child friendly’, but the spawn does seem to like the explosions - she finishes one rambling train of nonsense and says, “Tammy taught me to braid hair today in math class. You wanna see?”

“Go for it,” he says without really listening to her, because he’s pretty sure there’s nudity coming up and he’s debating whether he’s supposed to lean over and cover her eyes. He’s seen humans do that to their offspring in movies. 

She starts to wind her long hair into a clumsy, messy braid, tongue stuck out in concentration, and he half-watches her out of the corner of his eye. And alright, she’s small, and he supposes maybe her fine motor skills aren’t fully developed yet, and she  _ has _ only just learned, but eventually he can’t hack it anymore.

“No - no, no, no, stop. Enough.” He leans over to stop her little hands moving. “Spawn.  _ Beatrice _ . If you’re going to wear plaits, you should learn to do it properly. If you went out like that in the Fourth Circle, they’d string you up.” 

Her mouth has formed a little O of surprise, eyes wide. He’s upset her. Bollocks. 

“Just...go get me some hairbands.” 

She scrambles to her feet and brings him a handful of multicolored hair ties and a handful of bobby pins. He takes her over to the full length mirror hanging on the wall and drags a stool up to sit behind her. She really is frightfully small.

“Is this a Hell thing?” she asks, fidgeting as he slips all the hairbands over his wrist. 

He hums noncommittally. “In some parts. Lilim - demons like Maze - in the Fourth Circle wear their hair in braids once they’re old enough. How many people have you killed, Offspring?”

She turns to shoot him a weird look over her shoulder. “Uh. None?”

_ Ah _ . “Well, we’re going to pretend you have. You’re going to be a warrior, like Maze.” 

“Why?”

Because he can still remember helping Asteroth redo her braids after he’d pulled them all loose while she fucked him silly. “Because that’s the only style I can remember how to do.”

He works slowly, explaining the steps to her and showing her the movements in the mirror. To be honest, it’s nice to have someone believe him so easily, even if she is loud and inexplicably sticky. The spawn has never doubted that he’s the Devil. 

“You have short hair,” she tells him after a while of watching him work in comfortable silence. She kind of sways in place while she watches him, but it’s not too much of an inconvenience. “How come you don’t have braids?”

“I live in the Ninth Circle. Tattoos are popular there. And scarification.”

“To show how many people you’ve killed?”

“Mm-hmm. Among other things. Like where you’re from, and who you fight for. Your rank, if you have one.”

“You don’t have tattoos or...scary...?”

“Scarification. That means scars you make deliberately.”

“Huh,” says the spawn thoughtfully. “Well, why don’t you have ‘em?”

He slips a bobby pin into place. “Devil doesn’t need them, darling. Everyone knows who I am.”

“How?” 

He was the youngest devil in living memory, once. Perpetrator of the bloodiest conquest in eons. The winged warlord who sacked the red city of Dis. 

He twists his mouth into a smile for her. “Well, I’m the one wearing the crown, love.”

She grins back at him like that makes perfect sense - “Oh yeah!” - and he’s pretty sure that was an appropriately PG answer for a human of...what is she again? Six?

When he’s done, her hair is a sleek lattice of interwoven braids, and she beams at her reflection, fists clenched excitedly at her sides, leaning in to examine herself more closely. “That looks  _ so cool,  _ Lucifer!”

He reels her back in by the neck of her shirt to add the finishing touches. “Normally you’d have beads holding these, rather than bobby pins. Nice ones, engraved silver or obsidian. Or maybe dragon’s teeth, if you were  _ really _ important. But, well. We’ll make do.” He slips the final one in to pin down a couple of flyaway strands, and rests his hands on her shoulders. “There.  _ Now _ you’re ready to go out in public.”

She looks back, reaching up to gently touch her intricate hairstyle, like it’s precious. Then she whirls in place and flings her arms around his waist. “Thanks, Lucifer!”

*

Chloe gets home a little after 11.30, slightly tipsy and full of the warm, fizzy feeling that comes from a date gone well. Jake from Vice was funny, and outgoing, and a gentleman, and he’d dropped her off at the end of the drive with a sweet kiss and an  _ I’d love to see you again _ , and she’d told him she’d call. 

She’s quiet as she comes in, not wanting to wake up Trixie - not that she needed to bother. Her kid hurtles up to her as soon as she hears the door close, still fully dressed and hyped on sugar, looking like something from Game of Thrones. “Mommy!”

Behind her, looking a bit sheepish and stripped down to his shirtsleeves, is Lucifer, with a couple of Trixie’s hair bobbles wrapped round his wrist. He gives her a small, hesitant smile. “Hello, Detective.”

“Hey,” she grins back, halfway between amused and exasperated. “Monkey, what’re you doing out of -”

“Lucifer did my hair! Look, Mommy! I’m a demon warrior!” 

Chloe’s eyes narrow. Lucifer gives her a helpless shrug. “It was the only style I could remember. And - you should’ve seen how she was doing them, Detective! If she’s going to wear them she really should know how to do them properly. We can’t have her being laughed at.”

She looks at him over Trixie’s head, and - okay, the demon thing is a bit concerning and she’s  _ really _ gotta convince him to stop feeding her kid his delusions - but she can literally  _ feel _ her face soften. Jeez. “You -”

Lucifer is a terrible babysitter. He clearly fed her kid junk food, forgot to put her to bed, and looks completely out of place in her comfortable, single-mom home. But he spent what must’ve been hours doing her little monkey’s hair, and cares whether she’s made fun of at school, and - 

She knows, right there and then, that she’s not going to call Jake from Vice. 

_ Dammit _ .


End file.
